Matthew Hicks

Microsoft on Monday released its promised desktop search application, focusing on adding local e-mail and file search into MSNs browser toolbar, Outlook and the Windows operating system. Called the MSN Toolbar Suite, the beta software indexes users e-mail and desktop files and includes a link into MSNs beta release of its Web search technology. It […]

Yahoo Inc. will enter the desktop-search field in early January. According to the companys top search executive, Yahoo expects to quickly integrate its various online services into the product. The initial beta of the desktop client will let users search e-mail and files from their hard drives, said Jeff Weiner, Yahoos senior vice president of […]

An America Online Inc. error that began locking out users of its instant-messaging service earlier this week affected no more than 10,000 accounts, the company said Friday. The company continued to scramble to restore the AOL Instant Messenger accounts by Monday, and an AOL spokeswoman told eWEEK.com that the fix would include reinstating access to […]

Google Inc. introduced an experimental search service Friday that automatically suggests queries as a user types search terms. Called Google Suggest, the service is similar to a feature in Googles main Web search that suggests alternative spellings after a user enters a query. Google Suggest instead works in real time, listing possible search terms in […]

Oral arguments are set to begin on Thursday in Microsoft Corp.s appeal of a $521 million verdict against it in a Web-browser patent lawsuit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington will hear arguments from Microsoft and Eolas Technologies Inc., which holds the license to a patent on the embedding and […]

While the .com domain might get most of the attention, its smaller but still popular cousin .net is starting to gain renewed scrutiny. For the first time since the inception of .net, companies are vying for the right to be the registry that runs and manages the worlds third most-popular domain. VeriSign Inc., which manages […]

The Mozilla Foundation will release late on Monday a full version of its open-source answer to the e-mail client. With the launch of the Thunderbird 1.0 application, the nonprofit hopes to achieve in e-mail what it did with its Firefox Web browser: Persuade a groundswell of users to try its alternative to Microsoft Corp.s dominant […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Oracle plans to further embrace its renewed effort at application integration that it began a year ago, the companys president said here Monday. The company is expanding its product options for managing data across multiple business applications and legacy systems, Charles Phillips said during the opening keynote at the Oracle OpenWorld conference. Oracle Corp. […]

Desktop-search tools have become one of the industrys hottest trends, promising to extend the ease of searching for Web pages to the finding of hard-drive files and data. While end-users may jump at the chance to uncover their lost e-mails or past Web page visits, analysts and IT executives are warning enterprises to think twice […]

Google Inc. turned on the switch Thursday to its new e-mail list service that combines the Usenet archive with the ability to create and manage new groups. The new Google Groups, which has been available as a Google Labs test since May, brings the search giant the type of community feature that has been a […]